Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In the past decade or so, the mainstream press has offered waves of news features that have attempted to explain the state of mind in our nation’s growing Islamic population. The need for these stories is obvious, although most of them end up presenting a single, unified Muslim community that does not in fact exist.
Don’t you just love the religion beat? I have never understood the complaint that religion news is boring territory. It seems like every time I turn around this beat serves of some new and fascinating twist, often with either joyful or distressing overtones.
As I mentioned the other day, the Mattinglys of Ferndale, MD, received waves of really strange robo telephone calls before the election — since one adult in the house is a registered Republican and the other is a Democrat. We got ‘em all, folks.
Back during the 2008 campaign, I was invited to take part in an excellent gathering organized by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life that focused on candidate Barack Obama and the Democratic Party’s attempts to reach out to evangelicals and, in general, highly devoted religious believers of all kinds.
One of the things that young reporters struggle with is the realization that there is no one perfect way to approach a given news story. In fact, different publications my approach the same story in radically different ways.
Anyone who has read GetReligion for any time at all knows that our goal is to offer criticism — positive and negative — of mainstream news coverage of religion events and trends. The key word is “news.”
With that whole election thing over (yeah, right), so I suddenly feel a need to turn to Something Completely Different. Thus, it’s time to visit the tmatt folder of GetReligion guilt.
I hear, since my office is on Capitol Hill, that there is some kind of election going on today. The word on the street is that all kinds of terrified, emotional, angry people are going to march into polling places and destroy the era of hopeful, rational, optimism that has ruled our great land for the past 18 months or so. At least, that’s just what I read in the papers.
One of the first things that your GetReligionistas do when preparing a post in our WordPress software is to head over to the “Categories” function box and click all of the relevant choices for how we want this item stored in our archives. It’s a far from perfect process that keeps raising questions. For example, “Are Pentecostals really evangelicals?” Or how about, “OK, I know that Jordan is in the Middle East. But how about Iraq and Iran? How close is close enough? Do I really need to create ANOTHER new category?”
